Space

Certain types of bacteria can mutate to reproduce more quickly when exposed to microgravity, and that’s not great news for our space tourist dreams, seeing as we humans are teeming with bacteria. It’s not clear why these bacteria have responded so positively to microgravity, but researchers are now figuring out ways to protect astronauts out in space,

Is water the new oil of space? It may be to Middle Eastern oil states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are looking at space as a way to diversify out of the earthly benefits of fossil fuel. “Middle East oil states are investing in satellite technology and trying to transform their

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has done it again, detecting gravitational waves rippling away from a cosmic collision between a pair of black holes. Only this time, the pair met around 3 billion light-years away. This is the third time the observatory has successfully measured such an event, but just when you think you’ve

Scientists have found new evidence to support the idea that matter vanishes completely when it falls into a supermassive black hole, suggesting Einstein was right about these unquenchable voids lurking throughout the Universe. The findings show that black hole event horizons – the invisible barriers beyond which nothing can escape the intense pull of gravitational

Summer soon arrives, and the big planets Jupiter and Saturn will entertain evening onlookers, Venus will distract morning dog walkers and Mars starts a season-long hiatus. Catch a fattening, waxing moon as it approaches the bright Jupiter (-2.2 magnitude) in the southern sky on the evening of June 2 and then scooting past the planet June 3. Our lunar neighbour sails over the star Spica on

This Wednesday, NASA will officially announce its intention to launch a probe that will dip inside the Sun’s atmosphere, calling it the first ever mission to “touch the Sun”. The Solar Probe Plus mission will have to cope with temperatures and radiation unlike any other probe, but the data it will collect in the process

A star which normally would have been expected to end in a supernova surprised astronomers by going out with fizzle rather than a bang, leading them to suspect they’d just witnessed the rather quiet birth of a black hole. While researchers have long understood how black holes can form from the collapse of massive stars,

Just when we thought we had Jupiter all figured out, NASA’s Juno spacecraft reveals new results that challenge almost every assumption we’ve made about the gas giant. The first, said Juno’s principal investigator said Juno’s principal investigator from Juno’s initial two flybys back in August 2016 describe giant cyclones, a super powerful magnetic field, and weird

It might have just pushed back its manned mission to Mars, but NASA just fast-tracked a planned journey to 16 Psyche – an asteroid made almost entirely of nickel-iron metal. Estimated to contain $10,000 quadrillion in iron alone, if we could somehow mine Psyche’s minerals and bring them back to Earth, it would collapse our

It was 40 years ago today, on 25 May 1977, that Star Wars first burst onto cinema screens, and from that time the world changed for the better. Star Wars introduced the world to Jedi knights with lightsabers, an evil empire building a moon size planet killer weapon, a rebel alliance with X-wing fighters and

Scientists have proposed that an unknown type of planetary object has been lurking in our Universe this whole time, and it might have even given rise to Earth as we know it. Called a synestia, this doughnut-shaped object is thought to form when one planet slams into another, and if made official by the astronomy

Mouse sperm that spent more than nine months in orbit have been used to produce a litter of healthy mice, giving hope that mammalian reproduction in space colonies could one day be possible. While humanity is already pretty obsessed with the idea of getting off this rock and exploring the big, wide Universe out there, the fact

Researchers have proposed a method for detecting exotic events in physics by looking for the scars they leave behind on the fabric of space. By identifying how objects like cosmic strings or evaporating black holes leave behind memories of their existence on the Universe, it might be possible to move some rather strange phenomena from

The strangest star in the Universe has suddenly kicked into gear again, with researchers reporting that its light has started dimming in bizarre ways – just like it did two years ago when it baffled scientists with its irregular light emissions. This time around, we get to watch the investigation in action, because over the

Three Russian satellites that were sent into low orbit in 2013 are on the move again, and no one knows what they are for, The Daily Beast reports. Having been idle for more than a year, one of the satellites went hundreds of metres off its orbit last month to within 1,200 metres of a piece of a

Imagine a jet engine that could propel an aircraft faster than a traditional engine, taking us all the way to the edge of the atmosphere, all without burning fossil fuels – and for a low cost. That’s exactly what plasma jet engines should be able to do, although thus far they have been confined to

NASA space probes have detected a massive, human-made ‘barrier’ surrounding Earth, and tests have confirmed that it’s actually having an effect on space weather far beyond our planet’s atmosphere. That means we’re not just changing Earth so severely, scientists are calling for a whole new geological epoch to be named after us – our activities

Scientists have found that Proxima b – the closest Earth-like exoplanet to our own Solar System – could indeed be habitable, giving new hope that the right conditions to host alien life may lie on our cosmic doorstep. The discovery of the planet made shockwaves through the science community last year, as this newly discovered

An Indian teenager has won an international competition to build a functioning satellite, and not only has he produced what is reportedly the world’s lightest satellite device – NASA has also agreed to launch it next month. The tiny satellite weighs just 64 grams (0.14 lb), and will embark on a 4-hour sub-orbital mission launched

For the first time, scientists have detected evidence of a magnetic field that’s associated with the vast intergalactic ‘bridge’ that links our two nearest galactic neighbours. Known as the Magellanic Bridge, the bridge is a huge stream of neutral gas that stretches some 75,000 light-years between our two neighbouring galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic

Astronomers have found a giant exoplanet larger than Jupiter, but with extremely low mass – a composition that gives this mysterious ‘puffy planet’ a density very similar to styrofoam. The team who found KELT-11b, which orbits a star located about 320 light-years from Earth, says this “extraordinarily inflated” world is the third-lowest density planet with a

Hundreds of large flashes have been filmed reflecting off our planet, and they’ve helped NASA solve a mystery that stumped the likes of Carl Sagan more than two decades ago. These flashes are so large, you can see them from space, and they were originally thought to be caused by sunlight reflecting off the surface

Were you to look up in the sky roughly 2 million years ago you would have seen a star die in a spectacular blaze of glory. It’s long been debated whether this supernova explosion would have been close enough to impact life on Earth, and now physicists have shown that while it most likely wouldn’t

Supermassive black holes normally sit at the centre of galaxies, pulling in matter and devouring stars that get too close, but now astronomers are tracking one that seems to be speeding across space. Experts think this black hole might be recoiling – that’s the official term for when two black holes collide and merge, and

Unexpected findings about the atmosphere of a distant Neptune-sized world have surprised scientists, acting as a reminder that as we discover more about planets beyond our Sun, the lessons we’ve learned from our own Solar System certainly don’t always apply. In this case, HAT-P-26b – located some 437 light-years away from Earth – is what’s

Upcoming missions to Mars have grabbed plenty of headlines in recent years, but before we set off for the Red Planet, a lot more research is needed – and that’s why NASA has a new plan for sending astronauts into orbit around the Moon. It’s been a while – we last set foot on the

There are now 22 of them, and we still have no idea what they are, what they mean, or where in the Universe they come from – fast radio bursts, those brilliant bursts of energy that last mere milliseconds, but are a billion times more luminous than anything we’ve seen in our galaxy. The latest

If there were awards for most powerful and persistent active volcano in the Solar System, first place would go to the awesomely named Loki Patera on Jupiter’s moon, Io. Two years ago, researchers took advantage of a rare astronomical event to create a detailed map of this king of volcanos, finding a wave of fresh

Seeds from the morning glory flower can withstand huge doses of ultraviolet radiation, scientists have discovered, giving us more evidence that certain types of plant could be able to hitchhike between worlds through deep space. That long-standing idea is known as panspermia – the hypothesis that life can be seeded throughout the Universe, carried by meteoroids,

An experimental US Air Force space plane called the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) has landed after a record-breaking 718 days in orbit, but with military officials keeping tight-lipped about the specific details of the operation, we’re no closer to understanding the objectives of its secretive mission. X-37B OTV-4 touched down at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre

Earth seems drenched with water from mountaintop to ocean bottom. But our home planet is a desert compared to some places the solar system, both in terms of its total water volume and the amount of liquid on Earth relative to its size. Consider Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa, which is smaller than Earth’s moon.